Stereotypes of the Far East, dominated by images of China and Japan, leave Korea in a vaguer limbo, of acronyms or bestiaries: NICs or Little Tigers. But if the Western traveller does arrive with any idées reçues, they are liable to be soon dispelled. Seoul is now the third largest city in the world, as a municipal unit - bigger than Tokyo or Beijing. Size is no guarantee of modernity, as the desperate inequality and violence of the two greatest of all urban concentrations, São Paulo and Bombay, testify. But that is still the Third World. Seoul is not part of it. What a Londoner notices first is the ways in which the city is more advanced than his own.

LRB 17 October 1996 | PDF Download